She pointed to the shovel. “For the horse puckey?”
He gave her a curt nod, his gaze eating a hole right through her bruised soul. “For the horse puckey. Lunch is at twelve sharp. You’ll meet Greta, your parole office then. Be on the front porch to the big house or miss your meal entirely. Fresh water is in the cooler by the pigpen. Follow your nose and you’ll know where to find it. If you need to use the facilities, there’s an outhouse over there.” He thumbed over his left shoulder. “Any questions?”
Because he made the asking so approachable…
Rocking back on her heels, Bernie shook her head. Say as little as possible and suck it up, Buttercup, had been her motto from the moment she’d realized no one believed she didn’t know she was a witch.
She’d gone from wigged-out, anxiety-riddled Bernice Sutton to reliable, dependable, model inmate in less than two weeks. If she could do that behind bars, she could do that here in Catch Fire-Ville.
Taking the shovel, she didn’t even think twice about her shredding Kotex slippers as she pushed off the side of the barn. “Not a one.”
Ridge tipped his hat and sauntered off into the blazing mid-morning sun without another word.
Fee blew out a breathy escape of air. “Isn’t he just the shiznit, B?”
“Oh totally,” she muttered, stomping her way toward the farthest stall and unlatching the hinged door. “He’s like fuzzy kittens and Yanni’s pan flute playing in the background all rolled into one nurturing bundle of shiznit.”
Fee padded toward her, scurrying and weaving as he went. “Don’t be so grudgey. It could be worse, you know. You could still be that nutball KiKi Lemieux’s prison pet.”
She was getting testy and she knew it. She’d fought hard to maintain her cool all while she’d absorbed this witch thing in prison. But it was starting to eat its way through her gut. Add to that her stiff upper lip was on fire, and she was a hotbed for a meltdown.
“You’re so right, Fee. I could still be in a nice, cool prison cell brushing KiKi Lemieux’s hair for her, instead of here in Boiled Alive Landing in the middle of August, mucking horseshit. How ungrateful of me.”
“There’s the pity party I’ve been waiting for!” Fee swished his tail and a festive party noisemaker appeared out of thin air, sounding off in the general vicinity of her ear.
Bernie jumped as the abrasive noise intruded on the quiet of the barn. “Knock it off, Fee!” She swatted it away with an irritable hand—only to hear a crackle and a sharp pop, leaving the scent of smoke wafting to her nose.
Her eyes went wide when she looked down at her feet and saw the now-blazing party favor fall to the ground, hitting a bale of dry hay.
Fee squeaked and jumped up onto the stall door when the embers ignited in a dry huff.
“Water, Fee! We need water!” she yelped as the entire bale of hay began to burn in an orange and blue blaze.
Her eyes flew around the enormous barn, one that was so old and decrepit, if she didn’t do something it would surely go up in flames from so much dry wood.
She ran for a thick blanket draped over a stall door and grabbed it, her heart throbbing against her ribs, thick smoke making her eyes tear. “Fee! Make it rain or something!” she bellowed, her makeshift slippers sticking to the dirt floor.
Fee hopped around as the fire began to spread. “I suck dirty ass at elementals, Bernie! But if you listen to me, you can stop this!”
Lunging for the rapidly spreading fire, she threw the blanket on it, hoping to tamp it out, but that only made everything worse as the blanket caught fire, too.
Acrid smoke began to fill the barn in thick clouds of black. Rather than risk smoke inhalation, she scooped Fee up and ran for the door.
“Bernie!” he yelled, clawing the front of her jumpsuit. “You have the power to make it stop. Just concentrate!”
Bernie chose to ignore his advice, running straight for the door. She wanted no part of this witch business, and even if she did, at this panic-filled moment, she couldn’t parse frog sweat from the tears of a Dutch maiden to mix up a spell that would douse the fire anyway.
Smoke continued to billow in thicker clouds, moving upward toward the ceiling as the flames rose.
She couldn’t see a damn thing as she tripped and stumbled toward what she assumed was the front of the barn.
As though manna from Heaven, a weak shaft of light poked through the thick smoke to the barn entry and Bernie aimed for it, holding her breath and running with Fee tucked under her arm like a quarterback at a homecoming game.
She barreled outside to the front of the barn, only evident due to the harsh beat of the sun and her first intake of steamy air.
Fee slipped from her grasp as her eyes began to water and she hacked, falling forward into a hard wall of flesh.
“What the hell have you done to my barn?” someone roared, catching her in a pair of strong arms, preventing her from collapsing to the ground.
Bernie winced as more tears squeezed from her eyes.
Ridge. That was Ridge yelling. Appropriately named, too, for all the ridges his hot, muscled body sported—so sayeth her body, smashed against it.
And then before she could clear her vision enough to get a grasp on her footing, another voice piped in—an elderly one at that. “Break out the marshmallows and weenies, Poise Pad Wearers, and I’ll get the beer—it’s barbequin’ time!”
Bernie groaned on a cough.
Yee and haw.
Chapter 3
As some of the seniors and Calla Ryder, the director from the senior center, hosed the inside of the barn, Ridge eased Bernie out of his arms and toward an old, rotting barrel. Likely one of the very barrels his brother had used to store some of his infamous hooch.
Setting her down, he fought not to bellow a scream of frustration—not so much at Bernie, but at the way shit had piled up here.
Goddamn it. He didn’t need one more thing to add to the list of things that needed doing for his ailing legacy.
The farm. His parents’ pride and joy and, at one time, proudly called Donovans’ Crest.
Cue the beating of his father’s fists to his chest in caveman fashion.
Nowadays, it was more like Donovans’ Disaster. In full-on disrepair and in need of more work than even he, as a warlock, was capable of handling alone. With his brother Finn on the run from the Council, Ridge was totally solo in this and it was all he could deal with.
And Baba Yaga’s order that he take on Bernice Sutton to help him clean the place up as her community service left him resentful and pissy as all hell. But no one said no to Baba, the head witch in charge. Not if you liked living.
It wasn’t that Baba was a bad ruler over witchdom. In fact, he rather liked her at a party. She did a hella sprinkler to just about any ’80s tune the DJ played. But she was a pushy, interfering queen when not in a social setting.
Pushing him to come back to his parents’ defunct farm…pushing him to fix the place up even though she knew it was mostly immune to any type of laborious magic after a spell his father had placed on it so his sons would learn the value of hard work.
Which left him unable to snap his fingers and restore it to its former beauty well enough to suit Baba Yaga.
He’d looked high and low for anything his father might have left behind—an incantation scrawled in one of his many journals, a book of magic—anything with the key to breaking the spell so he could clean it up and go back to his life in Dallas. At this rate, it would take a full year to just get things up and running again.
No one else’s magic worked on Donovan land, either. Sure, he could whip up some candlelight, make a meal appear on the table, but the nitty-gritty of the farm work, like tending the animals, fixing broken fencing, baling hay—that was all manual labor.
His father had been a stickler for keeping the farm a place primarily magic-free, following the old order of rules, wherein being found out by humans was unthinkable.
He’d wished his father had lived long enough to c
atch a few episodes of iZombie or Lost Girl for a more enlightened take on living as a warlock in the twenty-first century.
But Ramsey Donovan often said nothing could replace sore muscles and gritty eyes after a hard day’s work on the farm, and he wouldn’t have fluffy magic wands and pansy-ass spells taking their place.
For the most part, Ridge agreed with his father, and if he ever had children, he wanted to raise them in just the same way. He’d learned how to fare, and fare well, in the human world because he knew the lesson that hard day’s work offered.
Except for right now. Right now, he’d give his left arm and a lung to be able to snap his fingers and fix this.
Finn had left the old homestead a goddamn mess, taking off without a word and leaving the few horses and livestock in peril, meaning Ridge’d had no choice but to come back and handle the aftermath.
Today, looking at this Bernie Sutton—her cheeks a mixture of red from the heat and black from the soot, her hair plastered to the side of her face with sweat—he wanted to haul Finn’s ass back here and hold his head under in the water trough until he screamed uncle.
But despite his resentment, there were the older witches and warlocks from Hallow Moon Senior Center to consider. They loved this place, and when Calla, his old buddy Nash’s wife, had asked if she could bring them out here for some daytrips to spend time with the animals and on the trails bordering the farm, he couldn’t say no.
Then add in the pressure from Winnie Foster-Yagamowitz, who ran a rehabilitation house for the parolee witches with her husband Ben.
Winnie, who, with pies and casseroles and fancy double talk, had convinced him to help his community by employing some of the women she housed, and he found himself with a bunch of seniors and ex-inmates at one point or another every day.
Winnie and Calla were already a force of charm and persuasion. Stir into the mix Winnie’s daughter Lola, irresistible in her own six-year-old right, and he’d been doomed from the word jump.
Most times, the aging senior witches and warlocks were less help, more shenanigans, but they made him laugh, something he realized he sorely needed these days.
What he didn’t need was some crazy witch on parole, burning his barn down because she was angry about serving her parole shoveling horseshit.
Clive Stillwater clapped him on the back, his craggy face lined like a road map to his long life. “Where the hell’s my buddy Petey gonna sleep tonight if some crazy ex-con’s burnin’ down his stall?”
“The fire was more bark than bite, Clive. Petey’s gonna be just fine,” Ridge reassured.
“Damn women,” he spat. “Should be in the kitchen makin’ sandwiches, not bonfires.”
Flora Watkins dug a knuckle into Clive’s side, her gray hair still in the neat bun she’d arrived with despite the heat and the dry winds coming in from the north. “You mind yourself, Clive. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, I’ll make you a sandwich outta your limp burrito if you keep talking about my persuasion that way! Now take your wrinkled old butt on over to the bus where it’s cool or you’ll have us missin’ Judge Judy with our lunch because you passed out from this bloody heat.” She pointed a knobby finger toward the senior center bus and scowled at Clive.
Clive flapped his hand at her, but he was moving his wrinkled butt in the other direction and far away from Flora’s glare of death as he retorted, “Bah, you women. All so damn demanding. Pushin’ us around like we ain’t got no say in anything.”
Ridge shook his head with a chuckle. “Now, Clive, you be nice. Miss Flora’s just looking out for your health.”
Flora gripped Ridge’s arm. “The fire’s out and it doesn’t look too bad. So go easy on her, will you?”
Ridge grunted, scanning the last wisps of smoke coming from the barn. “The parolee?”
“You know exactly who I mean, Ridge Donovan. Yes, the parolee, and she has a name. Her name’s Bernie, and I hear she claims she didn’t even know she was a witch.”
He hooked his thumbs into the loops on his jeans and glanced over at Bernie, sitting quietly on the barrel as her outspoken familiar circled her feet. “Says who?”
“Says rumor. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s been spreading all over town like the black plague.”
“And you believe that story? Who doesn’t know they’re a witch, Miss Flora?” She couldn’t have pulled that one over on Baba Yaga. No way would that fly with someone as travel weary as her.
“I’d believe anything at my age. Which is somewhere around two thousand. I think. Have to check my iPad calendar app the kids installed for me.”
Ridge sucked in his cheeks and narrowed his gaze. “You suppose she knows she robbed a bank?”
Miss Flora pursed her lips. “Don’t be persnickety with me, boy. I just think there’s an explanation we haven’t come across, is what I think. If you ask me, she looks a little lost. So maybe don’t be mean Ridge today. Cut her some slack?”
“Mean Ridge? Why, Miss Flora, I’d be insulted if not for the fact that I know you’re sweet on me. Gus told me so.”
She scoffed, her eyes twinkling as she drove her hands into the pockets of her denim skirt and rocked back on her pristine-white orthopedic shoes. “Who isn’t sweet on cloudy Ridge Donovan? Not one witch as far as the eye can see, that’s who, mister. All crazy women like men who brood and pout. It’s like flies on manure to a girl, brings ’em all to your yard. They think it’s sexy. They want to fix you. But I know the real Ridge, and he’s only standoffish at first because he’s busy assessing you, and he forgets he’s wearin’ his poker face when he does it.”
That was his business face, and it was true, he was assessing. He spent a lot of time reading body language as part of his job as a securities consultant.
Sometimes, you had to really dig to find out why a client needed a bodyguard to begin with, and he was good at parsing the crappy dangerous gigs from the current-visiting-pop-queen security job.
Still, he widened his eyes in teasing mockery. “Me? Standoffish?”
Flora wrinkled her nose and poked him in the ribs. “Yep, you, with that sourpuss and that frown. Keeps people at a distance, which I’m supposin’ you like until you can size ’em up right. All I’m saying is, give this one a chance. She seems like a nice kid who’s just pretty lost, and she doesn’t need your scary face in hers, glowering down at her and makin’ it worse.”
“And you know this after seeing her for all of five minutes?”
Flora began to wander toward the bus. “You forget who you’re dealing with, Broody McBrooder. I read auras, buddy, and yours is all pink and fluffy on the inside!” she teased.
Yeah. Fluffy. He raised a hand to wave to Flora as he picked his way past the lingering seniors toward Bernie.
She popped up from the barrel, reaching a hand backward to steady herself. “I’m sorry, Mr. Donovan. I’m really, really, really sorry. Sometimes, this magic…er, my magic just happens. But I promise to work harder to control it, and I’ll clean the mess up. All of it.”
He paused a moment, remembering what Flora said. Did women really find him attractive because he came off brooding and sullen? Was he really scary?
Stop.
Still, Ridge found himself relaxing his face in light of Flora’s words, shifting his jaw back and forth as though doing so would wipe away the scary.
He didn’t want to frighten her. He just didn’t want to have to deal with her or any of this when everything was already in such disarray.
“Something wrong with your face?” she asked, her thickly fringed eyes peering at him.
“I’m fine. This will all be fine, Bernie. Nothing was really damaged that can’t be cleaned up. And you can call me Ridge, by the way.”
She finally lifted her eyes, so green and round, so full of all sorts of things he found himself wondering about. “Mr. Donovan’s fine. I’ll go start cleaning up,” she said stiffly, wiping her brow with the arm of the burned fabric of her prison jumpsuit.
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Brrrr. She was freezing him out—and he found that disturbed him. “Why don’t you go grab some lunch first?”
“Is that mandatory?”
“Eating lunch?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not mandatory, but it is necessary. Look, Bernie, you’ve had a long morning. Go and catch your breath then we’ll meet back here for cleanup. I hear it’s tuna casserole day. Wash it down with some of Winnie’s homemade lemonade and you’ll be good as new.”
She blatantly ignored his mention of tuna casserole. “Is that an order?”
What the hell? Why was she suddenly so defensive? He put his consulting hat back on and took control. “If you choose to put that slant on it, so be it. I don’t want you passing out from lack of nourishment and dehydration in this heat on my watch. So go get lunch now, Sutton.”
Without another word, she smoothed her tangled hair back, pivoted on her makeshift slippers and headed toward the farm, her fancy familiar hot on her heels.
And with no warning at all, he chuckled.
Because if she could get a tiny glimpse of the mess she was right now, her jumpsuit clinging to her back, her strawberry-blonde hair sticking out at odd ends all over her head, those crazy shoes flapping up dust, she’d probably be pretty pissed.
He’d bet she was damn cute when she was pissed.
* * * *
“I don’t need lunch,” she muttered under her breath, stomping her way toward the rambling white house with the enormous front porch and a row of dead hanging plants swishing in the wind.
“Were you trying to take ‘burn this mother down’ to a whole new level, Vigilante Barbie?” Fee teased as he ran beside her, hopping over tall clumps of sun-dried grass.
Remorse twisted her insides. “Did you hear what that one senior Glenda-Jo said about the barn?”
“You mean that it was where Ridge’s parents got married?”
She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from crying. “Yes, and it was his mom’s favorite place to read so she could be by the horses. Shit, Fee. I’ve been here twelve-point-two seconds and already I’ve screwed up something of sentimental value. I didn’t mean to do it.”
Witch Is The New Black (Paris, Texas Romance Book 3) Page 3
